The king, we discover, is still possessed by grief at the death in the battle of a boyhood friend. Yet this is narrated at a tangent to history. The one set-piece description is of the Battle of Lutter in 1626, when the Danish army was beaten by that of the Catholic League. The Reformation, the advancement of scientific knowledge, the religious wars of the 17th century: you feel the influence of these, but only distantly or accidentally. Here, however, such history happens off stage. He loved Walter Scott for his rebellions and revolutions and epochal clashes of ideology. The great Hungarian literary theorist Georg Lukács championed historical fiction because, he said, it revealed, at its best, 'the great crises of historical life'.

History allows her to create a self-enclosed world. She pushes her setting beyond any evident connection with the present. As if in the teeth of James's precepts, it is all in the minds of her characters. In Music and Silence, Tremain gives little attention to the clutter of 'little facts'. You could not get into the mind of a person from the historical past: 'You may multiply the little facts that can be got from pictures & documents, relics & prints, as much as you like - the real thing is almost impossible to do, & in its absence the whole effect is as nought I mean the invention, the representation of the old consciousness, the soul, the sense, the horizon, the vision of individuals in whose minds half the things that make ours, that make the modern world were non-existent.' Henry James believed that the very attempt to conjure some historical past sapped the belief of a reader in the speech and the thoughts of any character. ‘Tremain is a writer of exemplary vision and particularity.This special exercise of the novelist's imagination has often been deprecated. 'Rose Tremain is one of the very finest British novelists' Salman Rushdie

‘Tremain has the painterly genius of an Old Master, and she uses it to stunning effect’ The Times ‘There are few writers out there with the dexterity or emotional intelligence to rival that of the great Rose Tremain’ Irish Times Tremain is a writer who understands every emotion’ Independent I Gradually the events leading up to Leon's stroke are revealed and a woman emerges whose capacity to love, hope and understand are far greater than she realises.

In her anguish Ruby appeals for help to a half-remembered figure from her colonial Indian girlhood - Sister Benedicta. Her husband, Leon, lies in a nursing home after a stroke that has left him paralysed her grown-up children are gone. Fat and fifty, educated only to be a wife and mother, Ruby Constad has reached a point of crisis.

Music & silence rose tremain